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Legal risk and more paperwork: do health and safety laws threaten the great Kiwi school trip?
(theconversation.com)
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I'd be sad to see them decline too, but on the other hand I also really hated it when a kid got killed by one last year when the school decided to visit a flood prone cave during a heavy rain warning.
There has to be a happy medium around high risk vs low risk trips.
There has got to be a mechanism to prevent individual schools from making terrible judgment calls.
Agreed, but it is a fine line to walk.
Unfortunately there will be mistakes no matter how much paperwork is and to the process.
Maybe there's opportunity for a pre-approved list? Visiting a cave sounds like a high risk activity that feels low risk, so it might be hard for a school to make a good call on. But if there was a list of activities to guide schools, maybe that could help?
It transfers some of the responsibility to the government (who organises the list), and could give schools a concrete list of things they should be doing or considering for different activity types.